by James Schellenberg (home)
1.For someone who hasn't read Winter on the Plain of Ghosts, what is the historical context of your story?
The Indus civilization was one of the world's three most ancient civilizations --.the others being Mesopotamia and Egypt. Its two largest cities were Mohenjo-daro (in my novel, "The City of the Tiger") which stood beside the river Indus in Sind Province, Pakistan; and Harappa (my "City of the Elephant") four hundred miles to the north-east in Punjab. They were built about four to five thousand years ago, and survived until approximately 1700 BC.
The Indus Valley ruins were discovered by Sir John Marshall in 1921. Marshall directed large scale excavations of Mohenjo-daro over the next six years. E.K. MacKay did further work from 1927 to 1931, and Sir Mortimer Wheeler carried out some small excavations in 1950. What they discovered at the Mohenjo-daro site (the name means "mound of the dead") was a settlement of around 5000 people, with streets and brick buildings laid out in an orderly grid pattern. Above the lower town was a citadel on which they identified a giant granary, an elaborate tank or bath with drains, a large residential structure, assembly halls, and fortifications.
All the Indus valley sites, including Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, were built on a grid pattern, with parallel streets dividing the city into blocks. There was also a sophisticated drainage system. Mortimer Wheeler says, "In its prime, the whole city bespeaks of middle-class prosperity with zealous municipal controls". Perhaps too zealous, in the eyes of some archaeologists, who looked at the wide, straight streets, and the remains of massive burned-brick buildings without much evidence of ornamentation, and imagined Mohenjo-daro as a kind of prehistoric soviet state.
Probably the best-known of the Indus valley artefacts are the distinctive steatite seals, engraved in intaglio with images of animals - elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, bull, etc - and also with pictographic inscriptions, as yet undeciphered. (Although there have been ambitious attempts - more on that under question no. 2)
2.What drew you to the theme of a collapsing civilization? How did the book get started?
The book really began with research for my first fantasy novel, Journey to Aprilioth, which came out 1980. It was a quest story set in 1970 BC that took the hero on a journey from Britain across Europe and into ancient Mesopotamia. Shipping records from the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia indicated trading links with "Meluhha" - which some archaeologists identified as the Indus Valley. The liveliest trading took place during the reign of Sargon the Great, around 2340 BC., when ships, quite probably from the Indus Valley ports, brought gold, silver, lapis lazuli and other precious commodities to Ur. A decline followed, and trade with Meluhha had ceased by 1700 BC. -- which co-incided with the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization. My next two books were set in pre-Celtic Britain, but once I'd finished that trilogy, I decided to do some research on the mysterious land of Meluhha - still in the same time frame, but in a new and unfamiliar setting. And to my knowledge. no one had ever set a fantasy novel in the prehistoric Indus Valley.
The central question of the book, of course, is what caused the Indus Valley civilization to collapse. The first archaeologists, working from a nineteenth and early twentieth century perspective, attributed it to invasion by the Aryan (Vedic) tribespeople from the north. Later theorists took the view that the Aryans simply moved into an already deteriorating situation. They postulated a variety of causes, among them climatic changes, malarial mosquitoes, overgrazing and deforestation, tectonic uplift and mud volcanoes, changes in the course of the Indus River, and/or recurrent floods that soured the land. Mortimer Wheeler says, "…the factors instrumental in the decline and fall of historic civilizations have rarely or never been of a simple and uncomplicated kind…. It may be taken as axiomatic that there is no one cause of cultural collapse." He adds, "One thing is clear about the end of Mohenjo-daro; the city was already slowly dying before its ultimate end." So I've taken my cue from Wheeler, and in Winter on the Plain of Ghosts, tried to describe some of the processes that might have brought about its downfall. I found that a lot more interesting, and more challenging, than writing about a civilization destroyed by a single, easily identifiable cause.
The other reason I chose to to write about Mohenjo-daro was pure serendipity., when I picked up a small scholarly monograph in a Victoria BC used bookstore. It was called "The Indus Script of the Mohenjo-daro Shamans" . I bought it, and later contacted the author, John Newberry, who lived in Victoria and was a relative of the book store owner. As it turned out, this was the first of a series of pamphlets in which Mr. Newberry was attempting to decipher the hitherto untranslated Indus Valley seal inscriptions, and I became one of his subscribers. As far as I can tell, his translations have received little attention from the academic community, but I happily made use of them in my novel.
3. How you do the research for a book about a time so long ago? Are there many records of this civilization?
The physical remains of the Indus Valley civilization have been thoroughly documented by the archaeologists who excavated the ruins - there's a wealth of available material. I read the standard texts, along with several scholarly monographs on other areas to the north where Rujik's travels led him And since Winter was written before the days of Google, I spent a lot of time with university periodical indices.
As well, there are clues to the social and cultural life of the Mohenjo-daro citizenry in the artefacts they left behind: toys, figurines, sculptures, pottery, jewellery, tools,. traces of food and fabrics. (The character of Bima is based on a famous bronze figure of a dancing girl) For the landscapes in the story, I read travel tales. For the religious and magical beliefs , needless to say there's a lot of conjecture and extrapolation -- but I tried not violate anything known to be true. Books like The Sources of Indian Religion, and works by Idries Shah, Eliphas Levi, Joseph Campbell and many others were stirred into the mix.